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Starting to Get Things Done

I’m excited to be starting in a new professional role next week. I’ll be joining the team at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies within Georgia State University as their website coordinator.

As part of the transition into a new position I wanted to take some time and re-evaluate my productivity systems. I’ve heard podcasters and tech professionals praise David Allen’s Getting Things Done for two or three years now, but I’m finally going to give it a shot.

It was Do By Friday’s recent episode on the system that pushed me over the edge. Merlin Mann’s admission that the book is somewhat dated helped me contextualize the method differently. He explains how many of the productivity apps and techniques we use today are based on or inspired by GTD. Once that clicked for me I realized that I’ve been using a watered down version of this system for longer than I thought.

As mentioned in my State of the Apps from early 2018, I’ve been using Asana and Evernote to keep track of projects in my life for a couple of years now. I’ve also experimented with more traditionally GTD-esque tools like Wunderlist and Todoist in the past. Now that I’ve started reading up on the original method, I’m starting to see how many of these apps have spun off from the core concepts. Asana, in particular, leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to contextual organization of tasks.

So in starting my new role I’m going to start from scratch. I’m going to try to implement Getting Things Done as close to its original description as possible. I plan to use Evernote as my reference filing system, a physical in-tray as well as a basic desktop-based email client, and either Things 3 or Omnifocus as my task manager. I’ll use the same systems for maintaining this site and producing podcasts, in hopes of simplifying my life a little bit.

One of the first tasks I’ll input into my new system will be writing a recap of the first month for this blog. We’ll see how this goes.